5. Crew, What Crew?
Key to Kirk's genesis as a character, and the familiar arc he takes through Into Darkness is his relationship with his crew - or so we are lead to believe. They are his life-blood, his reason d'etre, and as he openly states when things get rough, his "family," and he would do anything for them. That is the moral that underpins the entire narrative, and it is a shame that we don't really get much chance to explore the rest of the crew in anything like the detail that would make Kirk's devotion understandable. Kirk is a maverick, and it's hard to marry up his altruistic conviction with a crew that are largely absent, or at worst furniture to fill chairs when a slightly higher billed cast member pops out for an away party. The Kirk/Spock/Harrison triangle is very strong, and it's obvious that Abrams has concentrated on his strongest chips, but everyone else is under-cooked. Too many characters are there simply to make up the numbers (Sulu gets about three important minutes on-screen without any development at all,) and there are way too many comic relief characters. Speaking of which...